Tag Archives: Work/Life Balance

Do you ever leave work wondering what the hell you just accomplished in the last 8 hours? Between non-stop emails, phone calls, drive-by interruptions and meetings, our days feel wasted. And that’s a problem, since most of us want to walk away from work with the feeling we have actually completed something or at least made some mere progress from the day before.

Here are some things that I have found that improve my productivity and ultimately reduce my stress level at work. The trick for me, though, is that I have to mindfully and consistently practice them.

At the beginning of each workday, I print my day’s calendar from Outlook. Most of my day is paperless, but printing this and keeping it within eyesight all day keeps me on track. As things are completed, I highlight them or put a checkmark next to them. At the end of the day, this becomes my visual reminder that I have accomplished something(s).

As voicemails come in, or small requests are made from my customers, I jot these down on my printed day calendar so that I don’t forget about them. Periodically, i review these items for priority and time-commitment and ultimately decide if I can squeeze them into my day or if they have to move to another day’s schedule or task list. A lot of my stress comes from the fear of forgetting something, so having one place and one place only that my “reminders” are written reduces both the chance that I will forget something and eases the mental effort of constantly trying to remember all of the little things.

I actually schedule email review and projects on my Outlook calendar. For example, from 9-10am and 3-4pm daily I open Outlook, review email, prioritize it, get the easy ones out of the way and figure out what to do with the big ones. By carving out time to review email, I’m setting a limit to how much time I dedicate to it and am giving myself permission to shut it down so that I can begin work on something more meaningful to my job. By scheduling time to work on projects, I’m also giving myself permission to tell others that I can’t meet or do not have time for their impromptu sit-down sessions.

Setting boundaries and expectations for my time and efforts- this may be the hardest to do but pays off in dividends. When I receive a meeting request, before I accept, I require an agenda or a reason why the meeting is necessary from the meeting organizer. If the agenda is something that seems like it can be accomplished in a phone call or email, I decline the meeting with a reason why. I decline meetings that conflict with my task or project schedule or do not require my attendance. Since HR should be accessible, I do not like shutting my door. If an employee has a important matter to talk about, I will, of course, invite them in to talk. However, sometimes an open door policy works against you. In those moments, set boundaries with those people by asking if their question, or visit, requires an immediate response and if not, ask if you can schedule 10-15 minutes another time that is mutually convenient.

Get up and walk around. This accomplishes a couple of things. One, it gets you away from your computer, gets you up and walking, gets the blood flowing, the brain can take a break and you can reset your eyes. Two, if your peers see you up around the office, they can take these moments to ask you the little questions that they would have otherwise clogged up your email with yet another message.

France recently passed a Right to Disconnect bill providing employees the right to ignore work emails after hours without repercussions. Some have applauded the bill saying that it gives workers their personal lives back. Still others are skeptical that the law will really abolish a behavior that has become so conditioned in workers across the world.

Though benevolent in its motivation, the law won’t be successful. And even if it’s somehow successful in France, its D.O.A. in the United States. That’s because this law doesn’t address the real causes that lead to our inability to disconnect.

Only super humans set healthy boundaries. By many accounts, the current U.S. populace is one of the most debt-ridden, addicted, medicated and obese in history. This says a lot about our ability to say “no” and set healthy limits and boundaries for ourselves. That same underlying inability to set boundaries in our relationships with food, money, drugs and alcohol also prevents us from setting healthy boundaries with our work life. If we can access work from our mobile device or laptop, we will answer that work email or take that work call.

The normal 8-5 factory of office job is no longer as the world has transitioned from the Traditional Economy to the Knowledge-Based economy. The boundaries that were once defined for us- punching a time clock and using our hands to make a widget on a factory line- are the way of the dinosaur, extinct. Because most work can be done anytime and anywhere, individuals must rely on themselves to set their own boundaries. Which, as mentioned above, we aren’t good at.

We have been conditioned to be connected. Humans fear disconnection. In Daring Greatly, How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent and Lead, Brené Brown writes “Connection is why we’re here; it is what gives purpose and meaning to our lives. The power that connection holds in our lives was confirmed when the main concern about connection emerged as the fear of disconnection; the fear that something we have done or failed to do, something about who we are or where we come from, has made us unlovable and unworthy of connection.” Constant connection to work means knowing the latest and greatest, it means coming to work on Monday with no surprises, it means being one step ahead of your colleagues and in many workplaces being connected all of the time is recognized as an admirable trait worthy of public praise and maybe even some additional compensation. Why, with all of this positive reinforcement, would we not want to be connected?

Like this:

Meetings are stupid. When was the last time you came out of a meeting feeling like you really accomplished something and it was well worth your time? When was the last time you felt energized after a meeting and ready to haul ass in support of the company? When was the last time you left a meeting understanding the true purpose for the meeting? When was the last time you walked out of a meeting thinking the same message could have just been communicated by a brief one-on-one, a team huddle or a frickin’ email? Probably, you left 9 out of 10 of your last meetings rushing to get back to your desk to answer all of the emails you received, make your return calls and get some actual work done. Additionally, you also then realized that you now had to work an extra hour to make your deadlines that were held up by said meetings. This is frustrating. I get it.

Most articles you read will give ways on how to make meetings more productive like have an agenda, stick to the agenda, have time limits and “hard stops”, assign clear action items and task owners, etc… But you know the drill, we end up having a meeting to address how to have meetings. And how many of you have attended those? That’s an hour of your life you won’t get back.

Some people will say that it’s impossible to get rid of meetings. But is it? Or are we just being lazy. Here are some ideas on how to get rid of meetings or at least reduce the majority of them.

Get rid of meeting rooms in your office space. If we didn’t have meeting rooms, where would we congregate? Instead have smaller, huddle rooms and less of them. This will force people to think twice not only about having a meeting if a room is not available and accessible, but if the room is small, it will force an abbreviated session that will get down to the nitty-gritty of what needs to get communicated. Also, remove all comforts from meeting room spaces like coffee makers, water and food. Folks will be less likely to linger without those little luxuries close at hand.

Companies should spend time and money to train employees on effective communication. Yeah, I said it, don’t roll your eyes. What I see on a daily basis from CEO’s on down to clerical staff, in emails to meetings, from baby boomers to millennials is a sad indictment of what we consider to be appropriate and effective communication. This training should include training employees to become more self-aware in their own communication styles so that they can describe to others the best way to communicate to them. This training should include how to determine the best ways to communicate with others given their work styles and behaviors. This is literally a Comm 101 class where employees learn what the most effective vehicle of communication is given what is to be communicated. It answers the question, is my message best delivered verbally? by phone? by email? to an individual? to a team? Our human default is to call a meeting when we just can’t get our message across and it’s wasting time and pissing off a lot of people.

Like football, use a hurry-up, no huddle type of team get-together to quickly and effectively communicate messages that multiple people need to know. This requires a strong Team Lead who is an effective communicator (see above) that can get right to the message, translate the message in a way that everyone effectively understands, and everyone knows where they are supposed to be and when by the time the Team Lead claps his or her hands to head to the line of scrimmage, so-to-speak.

Use good old-fashioned reports and technology. Yup, both. If the goal of your weekly or monthly or quarterly meeting is to get status updates, by the time you are meeting everyone probably already knows bits and pieces of everything but also the information is old and useless. Scrap status meetings and require status reports from your team members on a routine basis that give you information on what happened this week and what’s projected for the week ahead. Provided this isn’t sensitive information, upload all of these individuals reports into a group share site so that everyone on the team or in the department can access them in real-time and on-demand. Managers and employees also get the added benefit of refining their individual writing skills too.

Ban meetings on Friday. The hope is to eventually ban meetings on most days of the week. Fridays should be dedicated to getting work done so that all employees can head into their weekend with a sense of accomplishment and ready to tackle Mondays with new work, not the crap leftover from the past Friday that was taken hostage to meetings.

Allow me to let you in on a little secret, Work/Life Balance is bullshit.

Much like the Easter Bunny, the Lochness Monster or calorie free macaroni and cheese, work/life balance is a myth. Just as Hallmark made up Sweetest Day to boost it’s bottom line, Work/Life balance was made up by Corporate America as a concocted promotion to convince employees that work and life are binary.

Corporate America created the problem, named the problem and then offered “solutions” to the problem. Corporate America created the problem, squeezing every little ounce out of its employees to increase their revenue streams, fatten the owners’ pockets and please its shareholders. Not surprisingly, this turned Americans into over-worked, over-stressed humans who felt put into a position to choose job or family and life. And voila, Corporate America invents the concept of Work/Life balance capitalizing on this zero-sum game. Americans choose work and lose, and Corporate America reaps the rewards. To quell the simmering anger, Corporate America threw us all a bone by offering “Work/Life” balance programs such as flexible scheduling, part-time opportunities, work-from-home, job shares and childcare-at-work. Yet, even with these programs Americans still report being just as overburdened as they were 5, 10, 15 and 20 years ago.

In a 2016 New York Times Article by Susan Dominus,Rethinking the Work-Life Equation, the author recaps the TOMO study by Phyllis Moen and Erin Kelly, professors studying the interaction between work, family and health. Moen and Kelly offer up what they call “Work-Life Fit”. Think of this concept not as life and work on the same linear plane, think of work as one little cheese wedge in the Trivial Pursuit playing piece of life. Like this:

And, in order for this mind shift to take place these things need to happen:

1) Give employees almost total control of how they work- including where, when and how they work. Focus on the outcomes of work against company goals and objectives and not how many hours employees work. As the TOMO paper states, this shifts flexibility from being a privilege to a given. Treating employees as self-sufficient human beings by empowering ownership of their work product should result in adult-like behaviors. In the end, most employees just want to do the work. Who cares how they do it?

2) Pay more-than-living wages. Let’s actually rethink compensation and the value of the work that employees provide your organization. Stop basing compensation on your competitors, FLSA mandates and wildly fluctuating market conditions, and pay employees based on the purpose of his or her work towards the desired results of the company. Can’t find the money? Look no further then your top executives. Does the success of the company really and truly fall on the shoulders of one or two men and women? I can’t even really think of a scenario in today’s world where that could even remotely be true. As workers become more specialized in their expertise and skills, CEO’s and President’s, rely on a more collaborative team of knowledge workers to achieve the company’s vision and mission. Consider this, in 2015, CEO pay increased 16.4% from the previous year while every-day workers got dicked with a meager 2.4% increase to base salary. The money is there, it just needs to be given to ALL of those in the organization that bring value and worth.

3) Paid Family and Medical leave for all working Americans. Fair warning, throughout my blog, I’m going to beat this one to death. The United States is literally the only developed, first world country with ZERO nationally mandated paid parental and sick leave laws. So you can give us all the stupid flex schedules you want company, but if I have to decide between my health and work, I’m choosing my health. If I have to choose between my family or my job, I’m choosing family. This is not because I’m financially secure but because my more actualized self compels me to make decisions that I will not regret on my death bed. And also, I’m little pissed Corporate America that you would force me to choose one or the other.

In reality, all of these things will take time and a great cultural shift to happen. As an employee of a company, think about how you can individually set boundaries for yourself, think about when and how you will turn work off, think about what emails and calls you will accept outside of work hours if any at all, and consider flexibility and ownership of work when you accept a job offer.

HR- I think we are in a dysfunctional relationship. The things I used to love about you are now driving me freaking crazy. The things are not moving forward and there is really no explanation for it. I think we are just going through the motions. You know this isn’t working. I think it’s time we break up.

Here are some things I think HR needs to break up with.

Performance Reviews- all performance reviews. Not just the annual performance review. Changing the frequency does not make a difference. HR needs to let go of the notion that performance is something that we can or should document and formally discuss once per year, or bi-annually, or quarterly. Within the rapid pace of the modern workplace where projects and priorities change daily, constant and daily feedback is required. The vast majority of the workplace is already populated by Millennials and Generation Z- these groups of folks take in their information best when its short, fast and often.

Traditional Full-time, Part-time Permanent Classifications of employment. Business must flex, flex or fail. The great thing about our current workforce is that there is plenty of talent out there looking for options- options to work on short-term project based assignments, longer-term contract-based initiatives, as consultants, as overseas resources or traditional regular full-time employees. HR should explore this available menu of talent options, build talent pipelines accordingly and present these options to the business as viable staffing options.

Recognition Programs- it’s great to be recognized for a job well done, or for excellent performance on a key project. Programs that mechanize the natural expression of appreciation and thanks come across as inauthentic. Rather, HR should focus on hiring people with emotional intelligence who have a general behavioral propensity for delivering authentic gratitude to their peers. HR also needs to hold those same people accountable for that behavior.

Managers and supervisors. I would venture to say that the majority of managers and supervisors are ineffective. They are ineffective for a number of reasons and mostly it is not their fault. Managers are often working managers and their people management responsibilities are compartmentalized as secondary duties. Most companies do not hold their managers accountable for people management responsibilities. Technically excellent employees are promoted to management because the company doesn’t how else to promote them. And, managing people is not fun or easy, unless you have a passion for leadership, most people do not want to manage (read: babysit) others. In our world where the only constant is change, HR should instead focus on the correlation of various soft skills to leadership, elevate those individuals and focus on readying internal talent to take on short-term assignments as team leaders and project coordinators.

Wellness Programs- I simply believe wellness initiatives and programs do not fulfill their mission, and that employees don’t really put a lot of value in them. I think employers love to say they have them to attract talent. I believe employees like to have the options available. If wellness programs were the answer to the work/life balance thing, and work/life balance is a made-up thing (which I believe it is), then of course it doesn’t work. Most HR teams I know, love the idea of wellness but the actual execution is time-consuming, stressful and ultimately not rewarding for either employees, the company or HR.

On behalf of all HR, this is over, it’s not you, it’s us, we are just different now. And we have grown apart.

In The Gifts of Imperfection, Brené Brown discusses how owning our stories and intentionally practicing authenticity helps us to accept that we are enough. On most days, I think I’m a pretty good HR professional. But there are times when the shameful thoughts creep in and lend doubt to the reasons I continue to pursue this profession. So here I am bearing my vulnerabilities to all 4 of my blog followers. Thanks mom, dad and friends 🙂

Here are my professional struggles:

I don’t like rules and policies. However, rules and policies are fundamental HR. Yet, I’ve never really been a fan of making rules and policies for everything. Why? Because I believe rules and policies are used as crutches by managers unwilling or unable to have honest and constructive conversations with their employees. I believe that if we treat people like adults, they will act like adults. I believe that patriarchal leadership is propped up by tons of rules and policies. I like to have the flexibility to work on a case-by-case basis. I don’t mind working in the gray area. Rules and policies spoil all the fun and totally kill creativity in solving complex employee relations issues.

I don’t know if I believe that getting a seat at the table will really elevate the HR profession to strategic business partner. HR professionals are conditioned to attain “a seat at the table”. By doing this, we are told that HR will gain the same “street cred” as the business functions that create income streams; thus HR will have a voice in the strategic direction of the business. HR is told that we too can earn our spot at the big kids table if we execute the tactical work flawlessly, if we source, recruit, hire, train, engage and retain superb talent, that we anticipate business trends and execute on change management. This laundry list while not even exhaustive is already bewildering. It just doesn’t seem attainable. But I’m not willing to give up hope.

I am sometimes too results-oriented. When there’s a problem, I must find a solution. My high “A” factor (dominance) drive on the PI assessment tells me so. However, in the world of HR and particularly in the practice of employee relations, sometimes there are no solutions. I have the tendency to automatically jump to a “remove the hand from the hot stove” reaction. Because of this I often find myself exasperated by employees who come to my office with a laundry list of problems and present zero solutions. I’m overwhelmed by my own prejudicial beliefs that someone could only be seeking my counsel rather than an answer. I also find myself overwhelmed because sometimes these problems have no solutions, or no solution that I have control over anyways. The reason is that in HR, sometimes the “solution” is just that you be there, that you provide a kind ear, that you are a sounding board, that you offer compassion and empathy. As an HR professional, I struggle to accept that listening can be enough.

I take on too much and when my cup overfloweth, I freak out. As an oldest child, Leo, an ENTJ on the Myers Briggs and a High A on the aforementioned PI assessment, I am hyper-driven and have an insatiable need to prove something. A la Trump, I need to prove I can do all of the things and do them the best they have ever been done before. I see a challenge and I run it down, tackle it and rip it’s esophagus out like some sort of wild cat of the Serengeti. Inevitably, I take on so much that I can’t possibly meet deadlines while turning in a product worthy of my high standards. This also sometimes leads to a sort of paralysis where my world feels like it’s spinning off axis and to exert control I waste my time doing something silly like organizing files on my desktop. As an HR Generalist, I have my hand in all sorts of things and I constantly struggle with with the need to prove, knowing my limits and saying no.

I have zero patience. In the world of work and HR, this is probably my achilles heel. As a child I struggled with having patience, and I continue with it as an adult. Things need to get done and they need to get done now. There is no time to wait. I have millions of other things to do, people to see, places to go, checklists to check off and so on and so on.

Getting my struggles out in writing helps. I also love to speak with fellow HR professionals; we bond over being in the same boat.

If you are feeling the struggle, I strongly recommend watching Brené Brown’s uber popular TED talk, The Power of Vulnerability. Also consider sharing your struggles with a community of HR professionals in the comments.